28 October 2012 8:49 PM

Until now, such public attention as has been devoted to
the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi on September 11, in which the US
ambassador to Libya and three others were murdered, has dwelt upon on whether President
Obama had falsely blamed the attack on violent reaction to a film about Islam
even though he knew from the start that this was in fact a premeditated attack by
al Qaeda.

But now, far more devastating evidence has emerged that
not only did he indeed know from the start it was a premeditated attack, but that
for several hours after it started the White House refused to answer desperate pleas
for help by American forces trying to defend the consulate – and who died as a
result.

Despite CIA denials, Fox
News reports that that an urgent request from the CIA annex for military
back-up during the attack on the U.S. consulate and subsequent attack several
hours later on the annex itself was denied by the CIA chain of command -- who
also told the CIA operators twice to ‘stand down’ rather than help the
ambassador’s team.

‘Former Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods was part of a small team
who was at the CIA annex about a mile from the U.S. consulate where Ambassador
Chris Stevens and his team came under attack. When he and others heard the
shots fired, they informed their higher-ups at the annex to tell them what they
were hearing and requested permission to go to the consulate and help out. They
were told to “stand down,” according to sources familiar with the exchange.
Soon after, they were again told to “stand down.”

‘Woods and at least two others ignored those orders and
made their way to the consulate which at that point was on fire. Shots were
exchanged. The rescue team from the CIA annex evacuated those who remained at
the consulate and Sean Smith, who had been killed in the initial attack. They
could not find the ambassador and returned to the CIA annex at about
midnight.

‘At that point, they called again for military support
and help because they were taking fire at the CIA safe house, or annex. The
request was denied... The fighting at the CIA annex went on
for more than four hours -- enough time for any planes based in Sigonella Air
base, just 480 miles away, to arrive. Fox News has also learned that two
separate Tier One Special operations forces were told to wait, among them Delta
Force operators.

‘A Special Operations team, or CIF which stands for
Commanders in Extremis Force, operating in Central Europe had been moved to
Sigonella, Italy, but they were never told to deploy. In fact, a Pentagon official
says there were never any requests to deploy assets from outside the country. A
second force that specializes in counterterrorism rescues was on hand at
Sigonella, according to senior military and intelligence sources. According to
those sources, they could have flown to Benghazi in less than two hours.’

There’s a heart-breaking interview with Ty Woods’s
father here. And just look
here
at the crass vulgarity with which Vice-President Biden apparently addressed
this bereaved father.

All this has been breaking in the US over this weekend.
So how are the in-the-tank-for-Obama media responding to these claims?
Hitherto, the mounting questions over the White House handling of the Benghazi
attack have been downplayed or even covered up. As Breitbart
reports, CBS chose to ignore its own interview with Obama by Steve Kroft on 60 Minutes on
September 12. This showed that, despite administration insistence day after day
that the Benghazi attack was caused by the protests over the film, Obama knew
from the start that, on the contrary, it had been a premeditated terrorist
attack:

‘In an interview
on Sep 12 with Obama, Obama told Kroft: “You're
right that this is not a situation that was exactly the same as what happened
in Egypt, and my suspicion is, is that there are folks involved in this who
were looking to target Americans from the start.”

‘Obama’s remarks pointed towards a premeditated attack,
in contrast to the story the White House went on to tell for weeks. CBS chose
not to air that portion of the interview with President Obama...According
to Fox News, the clip first appeared online on Oct. 19. It was embedded
Oct. 24 in an article
by CBS News’ Sharyl Attkisson.

‘What CBS chose to air, instead, was President Obama’s
attack on his Republican rival, Mitt Romney, who had criticized the administration’s
apologetic response to the Cairo demonstration. Obama said Romney “seems
to have a tendency to shoot first and aim later.” That portion of the interview
aired immediately,
and drove the news for days. Obama’s comment suggesting that the attack had
been premeditated was not aired.’

The Obama administration now stands accused of refusing
to come to the aid of its own forces seeking to defend its own ambassador and
consulate staff against murderous attack, thus suggesting the administration was complicit in their murder through either pusillanimity or incompetence – and then of trying to cover this up
by falsely blaming an irrelevant video. And yet, at time of writing, the mainstream
media is even now trying to ignore this. CNN is currently leading its website with the glad news that
Venezuelan President Chavez is backing Obama; NBC leads on Hurricane Sandy and Romney on
defence cuts; CBS very similar; the New
York Times in its section
on US politics is mainly preoccupied by the impact of Hurricane Sandy on
the presidential campaign; so is the Washington
Post.

I may have overlooked it, but at this moment I can’t
see any reference to the Benghazi story anywhere on the msm other than Fox. Yet it is hard to
think of a more devastating set of claims against an incumbent President. Does
anyone doubt that, if similar claims had been aired against a Republican
President at this stage of an election campaign, the mainstream media would
have gone collectively and ballistically into orbit?

‘In real time the White House, from the minute the
first bullet was fired, they watched my son, they denied his pleas for help; my
son violated his orders in order to protect the lives of at least 30 people. He
risked his life to be a hero. I wish the leadership in the White House had that
same level of moral courage...’

A sickening scandal and an electoral game-changer – but
only in any sane universe.

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22 October 2012 7:00 PM

My column
in last week’s Daily Mail, on the abuse of the Liverpool Care Pathway, has generated
a very large response both from patients' relatives with their own stories to
tell and from doctors and other health care staff.

As I wrote in that piece, it is an important principle
of medical ethics that dying should not be artificially prolonged, since this
is as pointless as it is degrading and even cruel. Accordingly, I have been
puzzling over why the LCP was ever thought necessary at all, since the
principles upon which it is based – that inappropriate interventions should be
avoided with people who are dying - should surely be axiomatic in caring for those
whose lives are drawing to a close.

One of the most thoughtful responses I received came
from a hospice doctor, who wrote:

‘I myself was one of the people who objected to the
introduction of the Liverpool Care Pathway to our hospice. My objection was on
the grounds that we were already doing everything that it recommends; so why
did we have to fill out a 17 page form, just to confirm that, for each and
every one of our dying patients?

‘However, the way we deal with dying patients in the hospice
is often very different from the care they tend to receive, if they are being
looked after in hospital, on a busy surgical or medical ward; and the Pathway
was brought out to ensure that patients dying in hospitals, at home, and in
nursing homes, received the same high standard of care that dying patients receive
in hospices.

‘And in spite of the concerns that have been voiced
regarding incorrect implementation of the pathway, it is generally
acknowledged that its introduction has raised the standard of care being
offered to dying patients on a hospital ward. The Liverpool Care Pathway, when
used correctly, does ensure that the dying patient is always provided with
adequate analgesia, the relatives are always kept informed of
developments, and no unnecessary tests and procedures are done in the dying
phase.’

As I wrote in my article, when the LCP is used
correctly on patients who are dying it is a laudable and appropriate programme.
Relatives of patients who really are at the end of their lives can doubtless be
confident that the LCP is an entirely humane way of caring for their loved
ones, since it seems merely to be an embodiment of good practice in care for
the dying. The danger - as I made clear – is that it is often used on
patients who are not dying, which is an abuse of the programme and may lead
to highly disturbing results.

The crucial issue is to distinguish correctly between
those who are indeed dying and those who are not. Where this distinction is
made correctly – and hospices doubtless lead the way in this, as they do in
best practice generally in care for the dying – the LCP may well be a model of
its kind. But where the distinction is not made correctly, the result is abuse.

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16 October 2012 11:57 AM

Fascinating to see tiny movements on the left to attempt open
up debate just a fraction on a taboo subject– and then watch the vicious
response.

Last Friday, Deborah Orr wrote
in the Guardian that she despaired of the left’s knee-jerk reaction on
issues such as abortion. Making it clear she remains firmly on the left, being
not only pro-choice but claiming that ‘the right’ had a deadening effect on the
terms of the debate about abortion (that’s not how it feels to some of us, but
let that pass) and confusingly equating in the course of her article abortion
on demand with UK abortion law (a telling muddle, maybe, but let that one pass
too) she nevertheless pointed out that, on the left, even to question whether
it might be better for women to bring down the abortion limit from 24 weeks’
gestation was to be accused of ‘giving in to the right’, thus making ‘honest,
involved and sincere debate’ impossible.

Now look at what has happened to Mehdi Hasan, a left-wing
writer with whom in the past I have crossed swords, when he dared voice a
similar abortion heresy. Last week he wrote a column
in the New Statesman in which, musing as did Orr on the howls of rage when
the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt suggested that the abortion limit should be
reduced to 12 weeks’ gestation, he recalled the late Christopher Hitchens’s
apostasy in identifying the ostensibly compassionate left-wing ‘pro-choice’
position as in fact the apogee of selfish individualism, while the supposedly
callous right-wing ‘pro-life’ position was in fact on the side of equality, human
rights and defending the innocent. Making his principled opposition to abortion
as morally wrong, Hasan insisted that this did not make him any less left-wing and
pleaded for his fellow-lefties to understand and respect those who held such
views rather than demonise them as reactionaries or medieval misogynists.

Fat chance! Hasan was promptly engulfed in a Twitter
firestorm, in which he was repeatedly told there was simply no debate to be had
on this issue; being ‘pro-life’ was synonymous with evil. Hasan subsequently
wrote:

‘It slowly dawned on me, at about 5pm on Sunday evening,
that no matter how politely, gently and sensitively the anti-abortion case is
expressed in the future, people on the ‘pro-choice’ liberal-left will never
want to hear it.’

Welcome to Planet Reality, Mehdi. So nice of you to drop in.

He was subjected to more of the same on the Today
programme this morning, when his opponent Suzanne Moore scarcely allowed
him even to finish a sentence, apparently on the grounds that she was fed up
with having to debate abortion once again with men. How dreadful for her! Of
course men shouldn’t be allowed to say anything on this subject!

Mehdi Hasan’s point was duly made for him.

Today asked whether abortion really was a left/right matter. As with so many issues, there is nothing intrinsically right-wing about
having reservations about the abortion time limit or opposing it altogether. It’s
a religious and moral issue instead. And there are conservative voters who
believe that abortion should be legal and that it is a woman’s right, just as
there are lefties who believe the time limit should come down or that it is morally
wrong altogether.

Nevertheless, being ‘pro-choice’ as opposed to ‘pro-life’,
and expressed in those terms, certainly is a left-wing position. This is because
essential to the left is, first, a secularist onslaught against Biblical morality
-- including the acknowledgement of the innate value of human life and the need
to respect it -- and its replacement by the unchallengeable authority of
subjective desires.

And second, the left is governed by the Manichean belief
that everything not the left is the right; that the left is the embodiment of virtue;
and that the right is therefore irredeemably evil.

Two things follow from this. First, Biblical morality and the
innate respect due to all forms of human life become an evil right-wing
position. In fact, not just on abortion but across the board the left is not
compassionate, generous or humane at all but is defined by selfish
individualism, callous utilitarianism and narcissistic self-regard.

Second, lefties are totally obsessed with defining themselves
as on the left. That’s because they really do believe that the left is
synonymous with virtue. That’s why both Orr and Hasan are so desperate to
maintain their left-wing purity – and why the inevitable left-wing witch-hunt
against such heresy on abortion is so unendurable for them.

Third, and as a result of the above, the left shuts down freedom
of speech and thought itself, by substituting vilification and demonisation for
reason and argument.

The abortion issue stands proxy for the closing of the
western liberal mind.

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09 October 2012 7:50 PM

If Dianafication describes the descent of Britain into emotional incontinence, Borismania describes the descent of Britain into demotic derangement.

This is manifesting itself in the mob frenzy that has been greeting Boris at the Tory party conference, with the mass chanting of his name by adoring crowds conjuring up distinctly uncomfortable echoes of other, more sinister leadership cults in Europe's troubled history. But it also seems to be throwing more rarified souls off-balance too.

The latest casualty of Borismania is the normally sensible Rachel Sylvester. In the Times (£) today, she writes that both Boris and the Labour leader Ed Miliband are snatching away the political centre ground from the Prime Minister who is instead lurching to the right. And she trots out the mantra intoned by David Cameron's pollster Andrew Cooper, along with the rest of the Cameroon modernisers and un-named jittery Cabinet ministers, that Cameron's 'dog- whistles' on immigration, Europe and low taxes are a bad mistake because the reason the Tories failed to win the general election was that modernisation had not gone far enough in decontaminating the Tory right-wing brand.

But if you look at what Boris and Ed Miliband have actually been saying, you can see this doesn't add up at all. For both of them have been seeking to wow the public not from the left but from the right. At Birmingham yesterday, Boris called for the return of selective education, for heaven's sake. His previous pitches have included sticking up for bankers or calling for tax reductions. As for Miliband, his 'blue Labour' pitch is all about faith, family and flag and defending the 'squeezed middle'.

Of course all this can be picked apart. Miliband is still a radical egalitarian; Boris is a social liberal. But the point is that both have understood that the Cameroon 'detoxification' project has created a lethal gap on the true middle ground of British public life - the ground inhabited by Middle Britain. And Middle Britain is beside itself over things like Europe, immigration, crime, welfare dependency, the attack on aspiration and the steady destruction of all the shared assumptions that once created an orderly and just society and made up British national identity.

The reason why Boris has such enormous popular appeal, however, is not so much the positions he is adopting as what he represents. He is someone with whom people can identify because he shows what appear to be the rough edges: he says what he thinks even if - as in the case of the bankers - that sets him at odds with the prejudice of the day; he puts his foot in his mouth by insulting Liverpudlians or the Chinese; he literally gets stranded on wires, his hair is a mess, he seems to be not a sleek sophisticate but a bumbling, shambling, bounding, Tiggerish puppy dog - and who crucially makes people love him not just because he makes them laugh but because he seems to love them.

Of course, much of this is fantasy. Boris is a cunning, calculating politician who tailors his message in order to win votes (just look at his flip-flopping over immigration, for example) - but who understands that in order to win he must appear to be an anti-politician. Whereas Cameron, by contrast, appears to be the quintessential politician, always openly calculating by adopting opportunistic policies, exuding arrogance and seeming to be looking down his nose at the lower orders.

People thought this of him from the get-go, while he was still hugging huskies and hoodies according to the decontamination script - because the British can sniff out humbug from a very great distance. And that's what they can't stand - falsity, the feeling they are being played for suckers. The reason why George Osborne's claim to stand up for the 'strivers' in society rather than those always on the take from the state is falling on deaf ears is not because the public want him to stand up instead for the poor, but because those who are indeed society's strivers feel bitterly that this government has hammered them into the ground.

Authenticity is the name of the game. That means consistency, the essential basis for trust. That's why so many feel that Cameron 'doesn't understand people like us', while Boris is thought to be 'one of us'.

In other words, as ever, the issue is not 'Tory measures' but 'Tory men'. People actually tend to like Tory measures - which is why, like a certain T Blair before them, both Boris and Miliband are tacking to the right. What they don't like is 'Tory men' - which is why Cameron can die in the last ditch for gay marriage or international aid and people will still spit tacks at his name; and why Andrew Mitchell, the Chief Whip who was so rude to a police officer, doesn't even dare show his face at the Tory conference.

The current raging epidemic of Borismania surely demonstrates, like Dianafication before it, that in this age of illusion it's the person who can deliver the most convincing fantasy - and thus allow the public to project their own fantasies onto him or her - who will win the day.